Apple’s October 14th Announcements

So Apple had some pretty good announcements yesterday and overall I’m very satisfied with what was announced. Rather than do a full run down of what was announced I’m going to instead do a quick list of the announcements (I’m sure many of you have already heard about them thus the shorter post).

Apple has managed to develop a way to carve a large portion of the new notebooks out of a block of aluminum which not only makes the notebook sturdier and thinner but also cuts down on the overall materials used to make it.

All of the notebooks (with the exception of the 17″ MacBook Pro and the old 13″ plastic MacBook) will be getting the new Geforce 9400M integrated graphics (The MacBook Air will be running it at a lower clock speed do to thermal constraints).

The MacBook Pro will also have a discrete graphics (Geforce 9600M GT 256MB/512MB) card allowing the user to switch from integrated to discrete when you either want more battery life or more graphics performance.

MacBook Pro gets an easy access panel to replace the battery or hard drive. But, will be losing FireWire 400.

All new notebooks get a mini DisplayPort.

MacBook Pro and MacBook get a buttonless glass trackpad (the entire pad is a button) along with a battery indicator on the side of the notebook.